Law Commons^™

The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, Shawn E. Fields

Indiana Law Journal

The singular focus on procedural justice police reform is dangerous. Procedurally just law enforcement encounters provide an empirically proven subjective sense of fairness and legitimacy, while obscuring substantively unjust outcomes emanating from a fundamentally unjust system. The deceptive simplicity of procedural justice – that a polite cop is a lawful cop – promotes a false consciousness among would-be reformers that progress has been made, evokes a false sense of legitimacy divorced from objective indicia of lawfulness or morality, and claims the mantle of “reform” in the process. It is not just that procedural justice is a suboptimal type of reform; …

The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, Shawn E. Fields

Faculty Scholarship

The singular focus on procedural justice police reform is dangerous. Procedurally just law enforcement encounters provide an empirically proven subjective sense of fairness and legitimacy, while obscuring substantively unjust outcomes emanating from a fundamentally unjust system. The deceptive simplicity of procedural justice – that a polite cop is a lawful cop – promotes a false consciousness among would-be reformers that progress has been made, evokes a false sense of legitimacy divorced from objective indicia of lawfulness or morality, and claims the mantle of “reform” in the process. It is not just that procedural justice is a suboptimal type of reform; …

Trauma-Informed Policing: The Impact Of Adult And Childhood Trauma On Law Enforcement Officers, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd J. Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Honorable Amy Dunn Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

For every six months that a police officer serves in the line of duty, he or she is likely to experience an average of three traumatic events. Such events may include fatal accidents, murders, suicides, and active threats to the life of the officer or someone else. Given the wealth of available data on how trauma reorganizes the nervous system to respond to everyday stimuli as threatening, this is an area that cries for critical exploration, especially in light of the frequency with which unarmed Black civilians are killed at the hands of officers who often make split-second decisions to …

Reinvest In Us: Reimagine The Role Of Police In The U.S., Jamil Davis

College Honors Program

In America, we must question and understand what is “law and order.” Over centuries, America developed a racialized slave-class politically and socially through power and force. Police are the foot soldiers of maintaining law and order as Slave Patrols evolved into the State Police. In my thesis, I discuss how their efforts in traffic enforcement enable a dominant class to target and enslave the oppressed class. Traffic control leads to 18 million interactions a year which is 34 people a minute. The numbers of interactions along with persistent practices regarding discrimination cause police to be a social liability. When bad …

Police Funding In The Mountain West, 2020-2022, Lana Kojoian, Miguel Soriano Ralston, Annie Vong, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Criminal Justice

This fact sheet examines data from Third Way’s report “The Red City Defund Police Problem” which provides information on police funding and other metrics on police forces. The original report offers a review of police funding and operating budgets for the 25 largest Democrat-run cities and 25 largest Republican-run cities in the U.S. This fact sheet includes police force data for 10 Mountain West cities (Aurora, CO; Chandler, AZ; Colorado Springs, CO; Denver, CO; Glendale, AZ; Gilbert, AZ; Las Vegas, NV; Mesa, AZ; North Las Vegas, NV; and Phoenix, AZ).

Grandma Got Arrested: Police, Excessive Force, And People With Dementia, Rashmi Goel

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Recent events have shone a light on the particular vulnerability of people with dementia to police violence. Police are arresting people with dementia and using excessive force to do it—drawing their firearms, deploying tasers, and breaking bones.

To date, little attention has been paid to the burgeoning number of people with dementia, one of society’s most vulnerable populations, and their experiences with the criminal justice system. This Article examines how dementia leads people to engage in activity that appears criminal (shoplifting (forgetting to pay), and trespass (wandering), for instance) and the disproportionate response of police. In several cases where people …

Creating A Better, Fairer Criminal Justice System, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

Articles

In the Fall 2022 semester, 14 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 14 incarcerated (Inside) students at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full-semester class together called "Issues in Criminal Justice and the Law." The class, taught and facilitated by Professor David Harris, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program pedagogy, emphasizing dialogic learning and peer teaching. The semester culminated with a group project, with the topic selected by the students: "creating a better, fairer criminal justice system." Members of the class organized themselves into small groups, each working for …

Police Reform Through Section 1983, Adam J. Smith

Northern Illinois University Law Review

For decades, members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) engaged in a protracted campaign of corruption, terror, and violence against Black and brown Chicagoans. Intermittent efforts to reform or otherwise rein in the CPD invariably fell short. In late 2014, a CPD officer murdered a 17-year-old Chicagoan, Laquan McDonald. CPD officials and city leaders attempted to whitewash the killing as a justified use of deadly force, but—thanks to the work of local organizers and a national pressure campaign—McDonald’s death instead led to a yearlong investigation by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ). Ordinarily, such an investigation would have resulted in …

Review Of The Little Book Of Police Youth Dialogue: A Restorative Path Toward Justice, Robert Brenneman

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Trauma: Community Of Color Exposure To The Criminal Justice System As An Adverse Childhood Experience, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Amy Dunn Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The reality that traumatic childhood experiences are directly linked to negative health outcomes has been known and widely recognized in public health and clinical literature for more than two decades. Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACEs”) represent the “single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today” according to Dr. Robert Block, former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

ACEs are traumatic events that occur in early childhood, which can range from abuse and neglect to experiences derived from household and community dysfunction, such as losing a caregiver, being incarcerated, or living with a household member suffering from mental illness. …

How Federalism Built The Fbi, Sustained Local Police, And Left Out The States, Daniel C. Richman, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the endurance of police localism amid the improbable growth of the FBI in the early twentieth century when the prospect of a centralized law enforcement agency was anathema to the ideals of American democracy. It argues that doctrinal accounts of federalism do not explain these paradoxical developments. By analyzing how the Bureau made itself indispensable to local police departments rather than encroaching on their turf, the Article elucidates an operational, or collaborative, federalism that not only enlarged the Bureau’s capacity and authority but also strengthened local autonomy at the expense of the states. Collaborative federalism is crucial …

Surviving Interlocutory Appeals: Trial Lawyer Edition, Grace Jun

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

This presentation provides an overview of Supreme Court caselaw regarding qualified immunity and government officials’ right to interlocutory appeal from denials of qualified immunity, and provides a brief discussion of ways trial lawyers can overcome interlocutory appeals to provide their injured plaintiffs with an opportunity to be heard and vindicated at trial by a jury.

Civil Rights And Protective Orders, Michael P. Doyle, Erin Brockway

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

“Open courts” are a bedrock principal of our judicial system, and court secrecy, including concealment of pretrial proceedings, poses a serious threat to public safety. Overbroad protective orders have concealed facts uncovered during litigation regarding some of the most important public harms, keeping them secret when the public needs protection. Protective orders routinely include provisions that allow parties to designate discovery material as “confidential” without further judicial review. These orders are often abused and result in unnecessary costs to litigants, the courts, and the public’s confidence in the court system. This is always a mistake because it harms the discovery …

Introduction To Re-Imagining “We The People" Part Two: Transcripts From The Aaj Education’S Civil Rights And Police Misconduct Litigation Seminar, Sarah Guidry

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

With this issue of The Bridge, we continue the discussions raised in our Spring 2021 issue: Police Misconduct & Qualified Immunity: Reimagining "We the People”, Vol.6, Issue 1. That issue shared the transcription of the virtual national conference by the same name, and featured an esteemed group of experts who discussed the state of racial unrest in this country, historically and currently. To promote further dialogue and support those who work to establish stronger protections against the use and misuse of police violence, we herein highlight several key sessions featured at the recent American Association for Justice Civil Rights and …

"Send Freedom House!": A Study In Police Abolition, Tiffany Yang

Washington Law Review

Sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the 2020 uprisings accelerated a momentum of abolitionist organizing that demands the defunding and dismantling of policing infrastructures. Although a growing body of legal scholarship recognizes abolitionist frameworks when examining conventional proposals for reform, critics mistakenly continue to disregard police abolition as an unrealistic solution. This Essay helps dispel this myth of “impracticality” and illustrates the pragmatism of abolition by identifying a community-driven effort that achieved a meaningful reduction in policing we now take for granted. I detail the history of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, a Black civilian …

Making The Optimistic Case For Policing Reform: Police As Partners And Reform As True To Democratic Values And America's Vision Of Itself, Dr. Ihsan Alkhatib

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Police Arbitration, Stephen Rushin

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Before punishing an officer for professional misconduct, police departments often provide the officer with an opportunity to file an appeal. In many police departments, this appeals process culminates in a hearing before an arbitrator. While numerous media reports have suggested that arbitrators regularly overturn or reduce discipline, little legal research has comprehensively examined the outcomes of police disciplinary appeals across the United States.

In order to better understand the use of arbitration in police disciplinary appeals and build on prior research, this Article draws on a dataset of 624 arbitration awards issued between 2006 and 2020 from a diverse range …

Improving Police Officer Accountability In Minnesota: Three Proposed Legislative Reforms, Jim Hilbert

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Crime And The Mythology Of Police, Shima Baughman

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The legal policing literature has espoused one theory of policing after another in an effort to address the frayed relationship between police and the communities they serve. All have aimed to diagnose chronic policing problems in working towards structural police reform. The core principles emanating from these theoretical critiques is that the mistrust of police among communities of color results from maltreatment, illegitimacy and marginalization from the law and its enforcers. Remedies have included police training to encourage treating people with dignity, investing in body cameras and other technology, providing legal avenues to encourage constitutional action by police, and creating …

Meek Mill's Trauma: Brutal Policing As An Adverse Childhood Experience, Todd J. Clark, Caleb G. Conrad, Andre D.P. Cummings, Amy D. Johnson

St. Thomas Law Review

Meek Mill, in his intimate autobiographical tracks of Trauma, Oodles O’Noodles Babies, and Otherside of America, describes experiencing not just several instances of childhood trauma as identified by the CDC-Kaiser Permanente study, but as a teenager, he suffered additional cruel trauma at the hands of U.S. police and a criminal justice system that wrongly imprisoned and unfairly positioned him in a revolving door between probation and prison. The data tells us that the trauma Meek experienced as a child and teenager statistically predicts a poorer life expectancy for him than those individuals that experienced no trauma or little trauma as …

Breonna Taylor: Transforming A Hashtag Into Defunding The Police, Jordan Martin

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

How can modern policing be reformed to address police violence against Black women when it can occur at no fault of their own and end with a shower of bullets in the middle of the night while within the sanctity of their own home? What is accomplished when her name is said but justice is never achieved? What good does it do when her story is subsequently overshadowed or overlooked by the reform movements that intend to correct racism and sexism respectively? This Comment analyzes both Black women’s vulnerability to police violence and their invisibility in reform movements. First, police …

Police Use Of Force Laws In Texas, Gerald S. Reamey

Faculty Articles

At the heart of calls for police reform lie use of force laws. While policing agencies adopt and enforce their own policies regarding when and how force may be used by officers of those agencies, state laws rarely define the uniform limits under which officers operate. Policing in the United States is highly fractured; of the hundreds of law enforcement agencies operating, most are autonomous, and they determine the policies under which they operate, including those for use of force. They also decide whether and how to investigate violations of internal policies, as well as the punishment that will be …

Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber

Publications

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about …

Race, Surveillance, Resistance, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

The increasing capability of surveillance technology in the hands of law enforcement is radically changing the power, size, and depth of the surveillance state. More daily activities are being captured and scrutinized, larger quantities of personal and biometric data are being extracted and analyzed, in what is becoming a deeply intensified and pervasive surveillance society. This reality is particularly troubling for Black communities, as they shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden and harm associated with these powerful surveillance measures, at a time when traditional mechanisms for accountability have grown weaker. These harms include the maintenance of legacies of state …

The System Is Working The Way It Is Supposed To: The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, Paul Butler

Freedom Center Journal

Ferguson has come to symbolize a widespread sense that there is a crisis in American criminal justice. This Article describes various articulations of what the problems are and poses the question of whether law is capable of fixing these problems. I consider the question theoretically by looking at claims that critical race theorists have made about law and race. Using Supreme Court cases as examples, I demonstrate how some of the “problems” described in the U.S. Justice Department’s Ferguson report, like police violence and widespread arrests of African-Americans for petty offenses, are not only legal, but integral features of policing …

Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

The Fourth Amendment Inventory As A Check On Digital Searches, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Police and federal agents generally must obtain a warrant to search the tens of thousands of devices they seize each year. But once they have a warrant, courts afford these officers broad leeway to search the entire device, every file and folder, all metadata and deleted data, even if in search of only one incriminating file. Courts avow great reverence for the privacy of personal information under the Fourth Amendment but then claim there is no way to limit where an officer might find the target files, or know where the suspect may have hidden them.

These courts have a …

Rethinking Police Rulemaking, Maria Ponomarenko

Northwestern University Law Review

For more than sixty years, prominent policing scholars have argued that the way to address the many problems of policing is to treat police departments like all other agencies of government—and to require that they set policy through something like notice-and-comment rulemaking. This paper argues that despite its intuitive appeal, rulemaking is not a particularly apt solution to policing’s various ills. Although policing scholars have been right to look to administrative law for ideas on how to govern policing, they have been focused on the wrong set of administrative tools. Instead of looking to the public to regulate the police …

State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett

Stephen Rushin

No abstract provided.

Interrogation Parity, Stephen Rushin, Kate Levine

Stephen Rushin

This Article addresses the special interrogation protections afforded exclusively to the police when they are questioned about misconduct. In approximately twenty states, police officers suspected of misconduct are shielded by statutory Law Enforcement Officer Bills of Rights. These statutes frequently limit the tactics investigators can use during interrogations of police officers. Many of these provisions limit the manner and length of questioning, ban the use of threats or promises, require the recording of interrogations, and guarantee officers a reprieve from questioning to tend to personal necessities. These protections, which are available to police but not to ordinary criminal suspects, create …